


we are wild things here (we are trapped here)

by TheMidniteOwl



Series: there by the oceanside and other tales [1]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Animal Bride, Captivity, Dubious Consent, F/M, Fae & Fairies, Fairy Tale Elements, Magic, Magic-Users, Merformers, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:48:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26035930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMidniteOwl/pseuds/TheMidniteOwl
Summary: When a mer is captured and sold to the highest bidder, he finds kinship in the wife.(What a pair they make: a fae bride cursed with a beautifully wrought iron necklace and a muted siren with mutilated fins.They could never return to their homes.)
Relationships: June Darby/Soundwave
Series: there by the oceanside and other tales [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1917085
Comments: 13
Kudos: 46





	we are wild things here (we are trapped here)

He’s rolled into a tank roughly, body aching fiercely as he gasps for air on the floor. Gills flicker rapidly and unkink to work, the fine sand irritating as the Pits. Soundwave forces his uncooperative limbs to swim to the darkest corner.

Humans knock incessantly on the walls and he ignores them and concentrates on the wretchedly warm water than on them. 

* * *

_You are a witch._ He can’t physically speak, he hasn’t been able for a long time now, but his Abyssal pod ~~didn’t~~ hadn’t relied on voices to communicate with each other in the dark, sunless waters.

“Not quite,” she says with a teasing smile, her face then sharpens, lengthening oddly before resetting back to their initial proportions. “But I am the daughter of one.”

_What is the difference?_

She watches him carefully, putting down her book, her eyes turn a searing shade of Primus’ fire blue and the necklace immediately burns alive. “That if I was any less human,” she says, quite mildly as if the skin of her neck isn’t bubbling and charring, “then I would be dead a long time ago.”

(Later in the morning, as she leaves with the man that bought him, her neck is smooth and unblemished.)

* * *

_Other humans come to you. Ones that aren’t normally here._ Soundwave drifts over to where she’s perched. There’s a book in her hands and her legs are in the water, bits of ice forming where her feet bob. His fins flick as the arctic chill runs over his scales and skin, quietly sighing as it chases away the constant warmth from tepid waters.

“I had many faces, including this one. Mama often came to town to sell potions to the apothecary then I took over.”

 _Some weep when they leave._ Soundwave smelled their silent tears as they carried off their land-pups or came out as empty-handed as they went in.

Her face twists with old anger and fresh pain, her words are apologetic. “The potions they ask for are very specific. It isn’t a matter of compensation from them.” She stares out the window, the fog rolling over the streets and the treeline in the distance. “I cannot venture out to the forests anymore. I cannot give them what they ask. Not anymore.”

* * *

Soundwave was captured, shredded, and bartered away like filleted tuna in Iacon’s markets. So far, he’s been treated as a decoration to a noble’s crystal cove or an exotic pet. He makes sure to stay well-hidden whenever more humans come over and feed on the chum the servants dump after he eats all the other fish. His mangled fins flare whenever an insistently stubborn human knocks constantly on the glass - a bitter reminder that at least he wouldn’t be driven mad by the wretched, empty vibrations if his body was whole.

He goes to the wife of _that_ man that sits at the top during the night because of the sudden chilly waters from above. She didn’t ask for insipid tricks or plied him with rotten guts, she reads quietly and ice dances by her feet.

* * *

The pattern sticks since it’s comfortable. Time shifts onward. Time becomes strange with nothing to do but stare out of the see-through walls. He sleeps. He eats. He waits for the cold comfort at night.

(Soundwave sleeps more and more and more. Even with more colorful fish added in, he leaves them alone unless they stupidly get near him.)

The pattern breaks when he dreams of his long-gone carrier telling tales of land-dwelling witches and their powers, of boons from clever deals and dangerous curses if done in bad faith.

( _When a witch holds a curse in her heart, there's nothing for anyone to do.)_

* * *

Mers tell their daughters to stick to the deeper waters and warn their sons not to trust humans.

June isn’t wholly human.

“Mama was right, though.” She sighs, quiet and sorrowful as they watch the crescent moon rise and fall. “They will break you trying to understand and fail in the end."

* * *

When June comes in the night and is well-rested enough to drain her reserves, she speaks as if the ocean had always been deep inside her bones.

(His throat closes and throbs. A painful reminder that he can't answer back.)

* * *

June has an intense sweet-tooth. Hot bread drenched with wildflower honey. Glazed nuts and dried fruits and flowers. Marzipan of foxes and fish.

Soundwave prefers strawberries; its flavor reminds him of its sea-counterpart: coastal succulents that grow on rocks but without the taste of the ocean in its flesh.

Sugar isn’t a staple for pods in the Depths, more for those that form communities with nearby human settlements. Salt licks are far more common. In the Pits, there’s small, near translucent fish that scavenges the seabed. If cooked, they’ll melt away but the raw flesh is sweet.

* * *

“He brought you here for me,” June says calmly as if a large, full-grown mer isn’t directly in her lap and her hands aren’t near a jaw full of serrated teeth as she helps pick clean the armor segments over Soundwave’s neckline and shoulders.

He tenses, the ragged fins curl tightly, biolights flash searingly hot - a dangerous warning. Those clever fingers hold still and she watches him carefully.

Human blue eyes watch him and he waits, swallowing down the rage, muscles forcibly relax but biolights still bright. _Did you order it?_

Her face is the same serene calm but her eyes flash, sudden and terrifyingly bright. Her hands tipped with a dangerous layer of ice. Sharp fingers move to get the stubborn bits out as she holds his gaze and he inhales the burning flesh.

“We’ve been married for over two years now. I have been a dutiful wife, so I asked him for my freedom on the first anniversary. He gifted me a tank and filled it with fish I once told him I had as a child.” Dagger-sharp fingers skim over his unprotected flesh -a warning of her own. Her expression bitter. “I asked for the same thing again. He returned with you instead.”

* * *

(Outside the manor, not all things are well. The forest is too quiet with fewer animals to hunt and traps go empty longer and longer. The woods witch still hasn’t returned.

The crops will fail that year. Again.)

* * *

There are no pieces of sea glass nor shells large and fine enough to carve. He can’t travel to Adaptus’ Trenches to bring her rare delicacies. Soundwave no longer has a voice to call and June has no tail for him to brush over with his own.

What he has are his hands, an abundance of seaweed, and an absurd amount of free time.

* * *

This is where June is most beautiful:

She leans over him and stares directly into his unshielded eyes. Long hair unbound and twined with his ornaments of seaweed and polished stones, claws rather than blunted fingertips digs into his flesh. Blue flames flicker in her eyes and when she smiles, it’s inhumanely wide and predatory -full of sharp teeth much like his own. 

* * *

When Soundwave goes over, June’s hands are empty and blue eyes unreadable.

“He wants a child.”

(What a pair they make: a fae bride cursed with a beautifully wrought iron necklace and a muted siren with mutilated fins.

They could never return to their homes.)

“I will deny him a child of his own blood, just as he denied me of my own. Will you help me?”

Soundwave has only one response.

* * *

_If you were never bound, would you have left?_ He asks as they watch the full moon rise again.

“ _Yes_ ,” she breathes all her longing into one word and her fingers stop tracing the random patterns on his scales.

 _You would have returned._ A statement. For all of her yearning for home, he sees flashes of a boy smiling sweetly that eventually became the man she married. What he didn’t expect is the torrent of grief and rage and heartbreak from her before it cuts off-

“I would have.” The words are choked out as she grasps the necklace caging her human form to her human husband. What’s left unsaid but understood that she'd have come back to live a human life if he had never sealed away her powers - effectively cutting June away from her kin and leaving her defenseless -under the pretense of a wedding gift to his new wife.

_And now?_

“Never.” June says firmly. He sees dark trees and lamps of blue fire, wisps trailing on the pathways, a large hound with red eyes and sulfur in its maw. A hand reaching over to tilt his bare face to her own, the pearl she gifted him warm on his collar. “I would have stolen you away.”

Soundwave _knows_ what she truly means. Mate-napping is quite common where he hailed from. In her mind, June paints deep, rushing rivers. They lead to the ocean and a settlement there with strange, winding, rocky paths and where humans walk on the waterways. The bright colors are no way somber as those from the Pits of Kaon, but he could have been content over there.

* * *

(This is how it ends:

After another year of failed harvests and disrupted supply chains, the manor of the man that brought misfortune upon them all was set on fire.

After all, fire cleanses.)

* * *

  
  


“‘Til death do us part, dear husband,” June says, huddled against Soundwave. They remain in the water as the blaze swallows everything, even the screams.

When the ceiling breaks down, it’s finally over.

* * *

It’s said that the man should have never taken a fox to wife or at least not taken away the beloved daughter of the woods witch who’d disappeared after the wedding - that the forest folk never returned in fear of an ill-gotten binding.

It’s said that the man should have never brought back that black-fleshed, black-scaled, faceless mer - that it was an ill-omen for all the terrible things that came forth.

It’s said that they all burnt to death in the manor - that if a person walks into the decimated skeleton of the main floor where the tank once sat, there’s a faint siren song, hauntingly beautiful and melancholic, a woman’s weeping, and the laughter of a witch’s last vengeance.

(People said many things.)

* * *

At a faraway coastal village, there’s a traveling pair expecting their first child. The woman with dark hair with a lovely iron necklace laughs away the inquiries over it, playfully telling each person a different answer. Her husband is a mute and a fisherman that does not fear the sea at storm -when the light hits his face, just right, his eyes flash red.

**Author's Note:**

> I was trying to do some merformers requests and it ran away with Magic!June to give birth to this universe.
> 
> Totally inspired by caffeinewitchcraft on Tumblr from the magic and witch stories. I did take a direct line from their "I can’t believe it’s not Proper Adjudication™" (When a witch holds a curse in her heart, there’s nothing for anyone to do.). I don't see June as malicious, even with a fae background. She can be a trickster but she wouldn't have subjected the whole town a series of crises that threatens all of them. Her mother, though? Whoo boy.


End file.
